Verek (Savage Kings MC - South Carolina #3) - Lane Hart Page 0,70

her time and do this revisit gradually.

“This is where you do your work when you’re here?” she asks.

“Yeah, mostly before the night even gets started. Then I stick around until a little after midnight to make sure there are no major problems – no fights, no beer shortage, no ABC inspections, then I leave and go home…” I trail off since most of the nights I worked here I would leave with someone. “You mind hanging out in here while I look over the books?” I ask.

“No, this is better,” Tessa says. “It’ll give me time to ease into everything.”

“That’s what I was hoping too,” I agree. By “everything” I know she means to get a handle on her demons, the nightmares that happened right after she was dancing here with me.

Pushing those depressing thoughts aside, I sit down behind the wooden desk to dig into the records Cannon and Conrad have been keeping while Tessa wanders around the small room, fidgeting with her hands like she’s nervous and not sure what to do with herself.

“You can sit down if you want. Over there across from me or on my lap. I bet you know my preference.”

“Okay,” she says in what sounds like relief before she comes around the desk and takes a seat on one of my knees. I wrap my arm around her waist with my left hand while using my right to flip pages in the ledger.

Once I’ve done a quick run-through of the books, I pick up the phone on my desk and buzz Damon, our head bartender, to come to my office.

“Yeah, boss?” Damon asks when he busts into my office, opening the door without knocking first. His eyes widen when he sees Tessa on my lap. She starts to stand, but I keep my arm around her. “You’re fine,” I tell her, placing a kiss on her cheek. “You too,” I say to Damon. “Catch me up in ten minutes or less on what’s happened these last six months that I need to know about.”

“Oh, well…” He scratches his dirty-blond hair in thought, and then he’s off, taking us back to around June when I first left, and there were some issues with waitress schedules that took a few days to resolve and a few other minor problems leading up until this week. Nothing that Cannon and Conrad didn’t handle and nothing that put us in jeopardy of losing our liquor license, which was my biggest concern.

“Thanks, Damon,” I tell him. “I may be leaving soon, but I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

“Yes, sir,” the bartender says before he slips out of the office, shutting the door behind him.

“So far, so good,” I tell Tessa.

“Are you disappointed they didn’t miss you?” she teases.

“No, I’m glad they didn’t. If this place got shut down because of my absence, Roman would’ve tracked me down and probably murdered me in my sleep,” I joke. The club is one of the MC’s biggest moneymakers. The rental properties have a lot of upkeep, taxes, and insurance expenses, the Harley dealership has to spend a ton of money in advance to keep great inventory in stock, while the club is mostly pure profit since we own the building.

“Are you ready to head out to the main floor, maybe dance with me a few songs before we leave?”

“Sure,” she agrees when she climbs off my lap.

When I take her hand, it’s shaking slightly as we make our way to the dance floor that’s about a quarter full compared to the last time Tessa was here in the spring. The two prospects are the only guys sitting at the bar not drinking. Instead, they’re both just staring over at us, so I flip them off in greeting.

“This good?” I ask when I stop in the middle of the floor to pull Tessa close, my fingers circling her hips.

“Yeah, this is good,” she says, resting her hands on my shoulder and upper arm. It’s not a slow song, but that doesn’t matter to us. When Tessa rests her face against my chest, I wrap my arms around her a little tighter.

“What are you thinking about?” I ask after a few more songs come and go, while she doesn’t budge.

I assume it’s the kidnappers or how they hurt her, so I’m surprised when she lifts her face to mine and says, “Sometimes, I think that if I had gone home with you that night, you would’ve forgotten my name before the sun came up. That